Richard Soley

Richard Mark Soley, Ph.D., Chairman And Chief Executive Officer

Richard Mark Soley, Ph.D. is Chairman and CEO of the Object Management Group®, Inc. (OMG®). Dr. Soley was instrumental in the founding of OMG in 1989 (as the founding Chief Technology Officer), and since 1997 has led the organization as Chief Executive Officer. He also serves as the Executive Director of the Industrial Internet Consortium®, responsible for the vision and direction of the world’s leading organization transforming business and society by accelerating the adoption of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

As CEO of OMG, Dr. Soley is responsible for the vision and direction of the world's largest and longest-standing not-for-profit, open-membership consortia developing and maintaining computer industry specifications. After joining the nascent organization in 1989, Dr. Soley led the development of the OMG world-leading standardization process and the original CORBA® specification. In 1996, he led the effort to move into vertical market standards (starting with healthcare, finance, telecommunications and manufacturing) and modeling, leading first to the Unified Modeling Language™ (UML®) and later the Model Driven Architecture® (MDA®). He also led the effort to establish the SOA Consortium in January 2007, leading to the launch of the Business Ecology Initiative (BEI) in 2009. The Initiative focused on the management imperative to make business more responsive, effective, sustainable and secure in a complex, networked world, through practice areas including Business Design, Business Process Excellence, Intelligent Business, Sustainable Business and Secure Business. He was also directly involved in the creation of both the Eclipse Foundation and Open Health Tools.

Since 1989, OMG has become one of the world leaders in the creation of international software industry standardization, building worldwide communities to deliver software standards that have changed the face of the software development field. Hundreds of member companies (approximately half software vendors and half software users, with government agencies and research institutions as well), volunteering thousands of product management and software development professionals, are currently developing some hundred software standards in fields as diverse as business processing modeling languages and methodologies, systems modeling languages, cloud computing, software modernization and real-time and embedded systems, but also vertically-oriented standards in financial services, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, military command and control, military and civil communications, civil government management and areas like smart energy grids and systems safety assurance for consumer devices from automobiles to consumer electronics.

In more than two decades at OMG, Dr. Soley has led the development of a leadership community on the OMG Board of Directors that has included high-level executives from IT vendors including IBM, Hewlett Packard, Oracle and Microsoft but also key vertical-market leaders like THALES, Citigroup, HSBC, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, John Deere & Company and many others, including many small and medium-sized firms as well. Through relationships around the world, Dr. Soley has become well known as a thought leader, giving hundreds of speeches on nearly every continent each year on issues relevant to standards, the adoption of new technology and creating successful companies. Dr. Soley also serves on many global conference program committees.

Before helping to found OMG, Dr. Soley was a successful entrepreneur, participating in and leading startups in the computer software and hardware arena. Start-up companies included A.I. Architects (the first leader in acceleration hardware for personal computers, and originator of the DOS extender), Symbolics (the most successful start-up in artificial intelligence hardware and software), PictureTel (the early leader in video telephony, now part of Polycom) and many others. Dr. Soley continues this early entrepreneurial focus with an active participation in venture investment and advising, with innovative companies including United Villages (sold in 2017, it was the leader in rural delivery of fast-moving consumer goods in India, with a recent partnership with Oxigen), rollApp (a Ukrainian/U.S. leader in rapid application virtualization for cloud delivery), Polymita (a Spanish company which was focused on being the world leader in business process automation, sold to Red Hat), ProcessUnity (a world leader in business process modeling for regulatory compliance and other innovative risk solutions), ClinicalBox (the leader in automated surgical coordination) and as investor and Presidente del Directorio (Chairman of the Board) of Toteat (the world leader in cloud-delivered restaurant automation systems, based in Santiago Chile).

An established leader in technology and industry, Dr, Soley sits on the advisory boards of Dover Microsystems, whose patented hardware-based technology delivers protection against entire classes of cyberattacks and the European Software Institute in Bulgaria, whose innovative software quality initiatives are based on world standards (including OMG). He is also a supervisory board member and advisor to IOTA Stiftung (Foundation), which is driving the design and implementation of blockchain that works: The Tangle.

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Founded in 1989, OMG standards are driven by vendors, end-users, academic institutions and government agencies. OMG Task Forces develop enterprise integration standards for a wide range of technologies and an even wider range of industries. » Read more.